You Shouldn’t Be Reading This

Someone once said that your mind is like a well-ordered desk, with the pens and pads and keyboard all nicely arranged, the pencils sharpened and all the papers in their proper place.

But every time you get on the Internet, you open up all the windows and let the wind blow through and scatter everything.

And so I decided to give up all blogs. I’m not going to read any blogs — but this one, of course. And I recommend this to you. Get off the blog thing — except for this one, of course.

I never heard of blogs until late 2003. Never even heard of them. I got started reading them in a big way in 2004, and it has escalated to the point that I probably spend between an hour and two hours a day reading them — and this has got to stop.

Most of it is nonsense. Most of it involves predicting things that never happen. And a lot of it, over the years, has just gotten me mad — and why? Is it so inconceivable that someone, somewhere should be both misguided and sure of themselves? Should this be a surprise? And should such people be my main source of reading?

I’ll read blogs on election night, because they sometimes are a better source for election returns, but aside from that, I’m getting out.

Partly I’m doing this because I saw a documentary on PBS that Peter Coyote narrated, about the plasticity of the human mind. Plasticity allows you to create new patterns of behavior, thought and ability (and it’s important to cultivate new abilities as we get older) but plasticity also makes it hard to break habits — like sitting down at a computer 50 times a day and logging on to the same web sites.

I find that when I go on vacation, part of the pleasure — no, not the pleasure, the RELAXATION — is being away from the nerve-jangling, freneticism of being online all the time. I think it actually plays with my mental chemistry, interferes with my ability to think deeply, as opposed to superficially and glibly. Certainly, it makes it hard to concentrate.

So no more blogs for me, except this one. And I recommend you all think of giving them up, too, except this one.